Part 30 (1/2)

If a saner lesson is to be widely learned, one way to it, if not the best way, may be an effort on the part of the units of the ”great nations” to realise the significance of the fortunes of the ”little nations,” in terms, not of the imagined consciousness of metaphysical ent.i.ties, but of actual human conditions--material, pa.s.sional, and intellectual. We have seen how erudite specialists can express themselves in terms of the fallacy of racial genius. Specialists perhaps as erudite, and certainly mult.i.tudes of educated people, seem capable of thinking as positively in terms of the hallucinations of racial ent.i.ty, national consciousness, political greatness, national revenue, and imperial success. Thus we have publicists speaking of Holland as an ”effete nation,” of Belgium as ”doomed to absorption,” of the Scandinavian peoples as ”having failed in the race,” and of Switzerland as ”impotent”; even as they call Spain ”dying” and Turkey ”decomposing.”

Nearly every one of those nations, strictly speaking, has a fairer chance of ultimate continuance without decline of wealth and power than England, whose units in general show as little eye for the laws of decline as Romans did in the days of Augustus. Spain has large potentialities of rich agricultural life; Turkey needs only new habits to develop her natural resources; the life of Belgium, indeed, is, like that of England, in part founded on exhaustible minerals; but Switzerland and Scandinavia, with their restrained populations, may continue to maintain, as they do, a rather higher _average_ of decent life and popular culture than that of the British Islands,[634] though they, too, have at all times a social problem to deal with. British greatness, on dissection, consists in the aggregation of much greater ma.s.ses of wealth and much greater ma.s.ses of poverty, larger groups of idlers and larger swarms of degenerates, with much greater maritime power, than are to be seen in the little nations; certainly not in a higher average of manhood and intelligence and well-being. Sir John Seeley, in a moment of misgiving, avowed that ”bigness is not necessarily greatness”; adding, ”if by remaining in the second rank of magnitude we can hold the front rank morally and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude.”[635] But he had before used the term ”greatness” without reserve as equivalent to ”mere material magnitude”; and even in revising his doctrine, it seems, he must needs crave some sort of supremacy, some sense of the inferiority of the ma.s.s of mankind.

Without any such constant reversion to the instinct of racial pride, let us say that ”the things that are most excellent” have no dependence on mere material magnitude. Given a saner and juster distribution of wealth and culture-machinery, each one of the smaller States may be more civilised, more worth living in, than the larger, even as Athens was better worth living in than Rome, and Goethe's Weimar than the Berlin of 1800. It was a poet of one of the larger nations--though it had to be a poet--who saw not hards.h.i.+p but happiness in the thought of ”leaving great verse unto a little clan.” And it was a Christian bishop, looking on the break-up of a great empire, who asked, _An congruat bonis latius velle regnare?_--Doth it beseem the good to seek to widen their rule?--and gave the judgment that if human things had gone in the happier way of righteousness, all States had remained small, happy in peaceful neighbourhood.[636]

As for the sentiment of a national greatness that is measured by acreage and census and quant.i.ty of war material, it is hard to distinguish ethically between it and that individual pride in lands and wealth which all men save those who cherish it are agreed to p.r.o.nounce odious. Even the sn.o.bs of nationality have, as a rule, a saving sense which withholds them from flaunting their pride in the eyes of their ”poorer”

neighbours, the members of the less numerous communities. Yet the note which is thus tacitly admitted to be vulgarly jarring for alien ears is habitually struck for domestic satisfaction; few newspapers let many days pa.s.s without sounding it; and certain poets and writers of verse appear to find their chief joy in its vibrations. The men of some of the lesser States, then, stand a fair chance of becoming ethically and aesthetically, as well as intellectually, superior in the average to those of the larger aggregates, in that their moral codes are not vitiated nor their literary taste vulgarised by national purse-pride and the vertigo of the higher dunghill; though they, too, have their snares of ”patriotism,” with its false ideals and its vitiation of true fraternity.

To some degree, no doubt, the habit of mind of our megalophiles connects with the vague but common surmise that a small aggregate is more liable to unscrupulous aggression than a large one. If, however, there be any justice in that surmise, there is obviously implied a known disposition in the larger aggregates to commit such aggression; so that to act or rest upon it is simply to prefer being the wronger to being the wronged.

Thus to glory in being rather on the side of the bully than on the side of the bullied is only to give one more proof of the unworthiness of the instinct at work. All the while, there is no real ground for the hope; and as regards the small nations themselves, the apprehension does not appear to prevail. There has indeed been a recrudescence of the barbaric ethic of the Napoleonic period in the Bismarckian period; but there is no present sign of a serious fear of national suppression on the part of Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Scandinavian States; while, apart from Bismarck's early aggression upon Denmark, and the ill-fortune of Greece in attacking Turkey, it is not small but large aggregates--to wit, Austria, France, Russia, Turkey, Spain--that have suffered any degree of military humiliation during the past half century; and it is precisely the large aggregates that avowedly live in the most constant apprehension either of being outnumbered in their armies and navies by single rivals or coalitions, or of losing their ”prestige” by some failure to punish a supposed slight. It is a matter of historic fact that the ”patriotic” consciousness in England had its withers wrung during a long series of years by the remembrance of such military disasters as the fall of Gordon at Khartoum, and the defeat of an incompetent general at Majuba Hill.[637] No ”little nation” could exhibit a more wincing sense of humiliation and disgrace than is thus visibly felt by mult.i.tudes of a great aggregate over military repulses at the hands of extremely small and primitive groups. Politically speaking, then, the future of the small nations seems rather brighter than that of the large; and thus in the last a.n.a.lysis the pride of the unit of the latter is found to be still a folly.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 631: _The Expansion of England_, 1883, p. 1.]

[Footnote 632: This though it be true, as remarked by Sismondi (_Histoire des republiques italiennes_, ed. 1826, i, 100, 101), that all nations spontaneously desire to be large and powerful, in disregard of all experience.]

[Footnote 633: This, it need hardly be repeated, was written before 1900.]

[Footnote 634: Compare the remarks of Freeman, _History of Federal Government_, 2nd ed. p. 41.]

[Footnote 635: _Expansion of England_, p. 16. Compare the further vacillations in pp. 132-37, 301, 304, 306. In the concluding chapter (p.

294) comes the avowal that ”we know no reason in the nature of things why a State should be any the better for being large.”]

[Footnote 636: Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, iv, 15.]

[Footnote 637: This was written before 1900. The disasters of the South African War confirmed the proposition.]

CHAPTER II

THE SCANDINAVIAN PEOPLES

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When the early history of Scandinavia is studied as a process of social evolution rather than as a chronicle of feuds and of the exploits of heroes of various grades,[638] it is found to const.i.tute a miniature norm of a simple and instructive sort. Taken as it emerges from the stage of myth, about the time of Charlemagne, it presents a vivid phase of barbarism, acted on by powerful conditions of change. The three sections of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden stand in a certain natural gradation as regards their possibilities of political development. All alike were capable only of a secondary or tertiary civilisation, being at once geographically disrupted and incapable, on primitive methods, of feeding an abundant population. In their early piratical stage, the Scandinavians are not greatly different from the pre-Homeric Greeks as these were conceived by Thucydides; but whereas the Greeks came in contact with the relatively high civilisations which had preceded them, the Scandinavians of the Dark Ages had no contacts save with the primitive life of the pre-Christian Slavs, the premature and arrested cross-civilisations of Carlovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England, and, in a fuller and more fruitful degree, with the similarly arrested semi-Christian civilisation of Celtic Ireland, which latter counted for so much in their literature.

But in barbarian conditions certain main laws of social evolution operate no less clearly than in later stages; and we see sections of the Nors.e.m.e.n pa.s.sing from tribal anarchy to primitive monarchy, and thence to military ”empire,” afterwards returning to their stable economic basis, as every military empire sooner or later must. Of the Scandinavian sections, Denmark and the southern parts of Sweden (round the Maelar) are the least disrupted and most fertile; and these were respectively the most readily reducible to a single rule. In all, given to begin with the primordial bias to royalism in any of its forms,[639]

the establishment of a supreme and hereditary military rule was only a question of time; every successive attempt, however undone by the forces of barbaric independence, being a lead and stimulus to others. It is important to note how the process was promoted by, and in its turn promoted, the establishment of Christianity. The incomplex phenomena in Scandinavia throw a new light on the more complex evolution of other parts of Christendom. Primitive polytheism is obviously unpropitious to monarchic rule; and in every ancient religion it can be seen to have undergone adaptations where such rule arose. In the widely varying systems of Homeric Greece, Babylonia, Egypt, and Rome, the same tendency is visibly at work in different degrees, the ascendent principle of earthly government being more or less directly duplicated in theological theory. Under the Roman Empire, all cults were in a measure bent to the imperial service, and it was only the primary exclusiveness of Christianity that put it in conflict with the State. Once the emperor accepted it, recognising its political use, and conceded its exclusive claims, it became a trebly effective political instrument,[640]

centralising as it did the whole machinery of religion throughout the Empire, and co-ordinating all to the political system. To use a modern ill.u.s.tration, it ”syndicated” the multifold irregular activities of wors.h.i.+p, and was thus the ideal system for a centralised and imperial State.[641] This was as readily seen by Theodoric and Charlemagne as by the rulers at Constantinople; and to such a perception, broadly speaking, is to be attributed the forcing of Christianity on the northern races by their kings.

Compare the explicit admissions of Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ 8 cent., pt. ii, ch. ii, -- 5 and note, following on the testimony of William of Malmesbury as to Charlemagne. Other ecclesiastical historians coincide. ”Numbers of the earliest and most active converts, both in Germany and England, were connected with the royal households; and in this way it would naturally occur that measures which related to the organising of the Church would emanate directly from the King.... It is indeed remarkable that so long as kings were esteemed the real patrons of the Church, she felt no wish to define exactly her relations to the civil power; the two authorities ... _laboured to enforce obedience to each other_” (Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, pp. 56-57).

The same historian (p. 127) describes the Wends of the eleventh century as seeing in the missionary a means for their subjection to Germany, and as ”constantly attempting to regain their independence and extinguish the few glimmerings of truth that had been forced into their minds.”

Northern paganism, more than the semi-cosmopolitan polytheism of the south in the period of Augustus, was a local and domestic faith, lending itself to separateness and independence, as did the civic and family religions of early Greece and Rome. While there were communal a.s.semblies with specially solemn sacrifices, the popular beliefs were such that every district could have its holy places, and every family or group its special rites;[642] and in primitive Scandinavia a priesthood could still less develop than even in primitive Germany, whose lack of any system corresponding to the Druidism of Gaul is still empirically ascribed to some anti-sacerdotal element in the ”national character,”

whereas it is plainly a result of the nomadic life-conditions of the scattered people. In germ the Teutonic priesthood was extremely powerful, being the judiciary power from which there was no appeal.[643]

But an organised priestly system can arise only on the basis of some measure of political levelling or centralisation, involving some peaceful inter-communication. Romanised Christianity, coming ready-made from its centre, permitted of no wors.h.i.+p save that of the consecrated church, and no ministry save that of the ordained priest.[644] Only the most obstinately conservative kings or chieftains, therefore, could fail to see their immediate advantage in adopting it.[645]

Naturally the early Christian records gloss the facts. Thus it is told in the life of Anskar (Ancharius) that ”the Swedes” sent messengers to the Emperor Ludovic the Pious (_circa_ 825) telling that ”many” of them ”longed to embrace the Christian faith”--a story for which the only possible basis would be the longings and perhaps the propaganda of Christian captives of some western European nationality. (Cp. Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, p. 110, _notes_, and p. 111.) Still it is admitted that the king was avowedly willing to listen; and the tale of the first acceptance of Christianity in Sweden, even if true in detail, would plainly point to a carefully rehea.r.s.ed plan under the king's supervision. The admission that afterwards there was a return to heathenism for nearly a century consists entirely with the view that the first tentative was one of kingly policy. See Geijer, c.

iii, pp. 34, 35. It was the people who drove out the missionaries; and Hardwick's statement that after seven years Anskar ”was able to regain his hold on the affections of the Swedes” is confuted by his own narrative. All that Anskar obtained was a toleration of his mission; and this was given after a trial by lots, on heathen principles (Hardwick, pp. 112, 113; cp. p. 115). The account in Crichton and Wheaton's _Scandinavia_, 1837, i, 122, brings the king's initiative into prominence. (Cp. Otte, _Scandinavian History_, 1874, p. 34.) They also note that Charlemagne, in treating with the Danes, ”did not attempt to impose his religion”